Last week in San Francisco, JavaOne, the world’s largest Java conference happened. This year we were there representing. It was a wonderful experience being around so many developers and hearing how they are tackling real-world problems using the power of Java. We talked with folks from all different business sectors and backgrounds and heard many talks on the latest cutting edge technologies in our space.

We were there not only introducing the Java community to our various products, such as Treehouse for Business and our Java Web Development Techdegree but also to gather content needs and ideas in real time. We maintain a content request board where we gather requests from students so this was a great foray into collecting ideas for our newer audiences.

Core Software Design Principles

If you haven’t yet seen a Venkat Subramaniam talk yet, you’re missing out. Venkat is able to break down extremely difficult to understand topics into bite sized digestible and delightful chunks. In this talk he discusses the SOLID object oriented design principles. Warning, it’s a lot of fun. If you like his style make sure to check out Let’s Get Lazy: Explore the Real Power of Streams a very close runner-up to my favorites list.

Microservices for Mortals

There was a lot of buzz this year around microservices which is the concept of breaking down large application into reusable but separate scalable services that are all interconnected through protocol but don’t share data. If that sounds like magic, it kind of is. But, wait! Watch this talk from Bert Ertman as he addresses the hype and explains how we got to where we are.

Docker for Java Developers

If you haven’t gotten a chance to explore Docker, I highly recommend this tutorial. Arun Gupta provides an in-depth walkthrough of how you can start using Docker now and shows off additional Docker Swarm tools. Oracle made an announcement in the keynote that an official Oracle Java Docker is coming quite soon.

Preparing for the next version of Java

Another series worth watching come directly from the Oracle JDK team surrounding a release of Java slated for 2017, the biggest part of that being Project Jigsaw a new module system: